A Line to Kill

18 The Hercule Programme

If there hadn’t been a glitch with the hotel computer, we would never have seen Maïssa Lamar again. She was arguing with the hotel receptionist when we got back, trying to settle her bill.

‘Please … I have to leave now.’

‘I’m sorry, Ms Lamar. What was your room number again?’

‘I already tell you!’

She was not alone. The fair-haired man I’d seen at Southampton Airport and later in the street outside the cinema was standing next to her. They both had suitcases.

‘You on your way home?’ Hawthorne had already noticed the taxi waiting outside. He closed in on her with relish.

‘Mr Hawthorne!’ She was annoyed and didn’t try to hide it. ‘Yes. I wish to return home at once.’

‘That’s very strange. I thought we’d all been told to stick around.’ He examined the other man. ‘And you must be the toy boy Tony saw at the airport. It seems he was right after all.’

‘Here you are!’ The receptionist had won control of the computer. He hit a button and the printer spat out two sheets of paper.

But it was too late for Maïssa. ‘You talk to me now or I’ll close down your flight,’ Hawthorne said. ‘Don’t believe I can’t do it. And maybe you should drop the pantomime French. I know who you are. I know what you’re doing here. You’ve been interfering in what has now become a double murder investigation. You have no idea how much trouble I can make for you.’

She hesitated, but not for very long. ‘We will pay the account in a minute,’ she told the receptionist and I noticed an immediate improvement in her English. ‘Where do you want to talk?’ she asked.

‘The lounge.’

It was half past six and a few guests had already trickled into the dining room. The four of us made our way to a table in the far corner of the room next door. With everything that had happened – the disappearance of Helen le Mesurier, the discovery of the body, the visit to Derek Abbott – I hadn’t had a chance to tell Hawthorne what I had discovered. ‘She’s not a performance poet!’ I blurted out as we sat down.

Hawthorne looked at me a little sadly. ‘I know that, mate.’

Even Maïssa looked unimpressed. ‘So how do you know about me?’ she asked, addressing Hawthorne.

‘It was pretty easy, to be honest with you, love. At the airport you said you’d just given a performance at the Red Lion theatre in Camden. There’s an Old Red Lion theatre, but it’s in Islington. So then I looked you up on Wikipedia.’

‘I looked at her entry too!’ I said. ‘It didn’t tell me anything.’

‘Well, it told me a lot. For a start, most of it’s rubbish. If you cross-reference, I think you’ll find most of it’s been nicked from another poet, Linda Maria Baros, including her date of birth and the titles of her poems … although they’ve made a few changes. She didn’t win any of those prizes. It took me about five seconds to check and they went to Hubert Mingarelli, Yves Namur and Jean Orizet. Good luck to them! But the biggest mistake was also the most obvious.’

‘What was that?’ I asked.

‘She’s only translated into German, Italian and Spanish, so why would she even have a Wikipedia entry in English? It doesn’t make any sense unless it was deliberately put there for anyone at the Alderney Festival who happened to look her up.’

‘So who is she?’ I asked.

‘Well, since she’s somehow got permission to shove off while the rest of us are stuck here, and since there are no scheduled flights at this time of night, she must be working with the French authorities. I’d say she’s from OLAF.’ Hawthorne glanced at her. ‘Is that right?’

Dr Queripel had told us about OLAF, the European anti-fraud office. He’d said he had written to them.

Maïssa nodded.

‘And while we’re all sharing confidences, why don’t you tell us your real name?’

‘Maïssa Lamar is my actual name. This is my colleague, Emil Odoli.’ She was referring to the fair-haired man who had taken a seat, sullenly, next to her.

‘You’ve been sent here to look into the power line. I mean, the idea of going undercover with a bunch of second-class writers at a festival nobody’s ever heard of sounds pretty lunatic to me – but then I suppose you are French …’

‘Thanks, Hawthorne,’ I growled.

A waitress came over to see if we wanted anything, but Hawthorne waved her away.

‘All right,’ Maïssa began. It was strange how everything she said, and the way that she said it, was completely at odds with her appearance. I wondered if the haircut and the piercings had been imposed on her as part of her disguise. Surely she didn’t always look like that? ‘You are absolutely correct. Emil and I are investigators with OLAF, working with the Hercule Programme. This programme is designed to combat embezzlement and misconduct in public procurement, among many other things.’ She paused. ‘What I am about to tell you is, of course, confidential.’

Hawthorne was losing his patience. ‘Come on, please. I think we’re a bit past that now.’

‘Very well.’ She took a breath. ‘So … six months ago we received information which related to the activities of a company called Électricité du Nord, which is based in Rennes and is involved with the construction of the Normandy-Alderney-Britain power line, or NAB, as it is called here. The information suggested that they were making large payments to a person on the island who, in return, had promised to use his influence to make sure that the States gave their support to the project.’

‘You’re talking about Charles le Mesurier,’ I said.

‘Exactly. He received several cash payments in his capacity as adviser to the company, but we believe that a much larger sum of money was concealed in the purchase of a land parcelle that he owned, which would be used as the site for the converter station. Électricité du Nord agreed to pay five times the actual value of the land once the permission had been granted, and that was how he would make his profit.’

‘But you had no proof,’ Hawthorne said.

‘That is right, Mr Hawthorne. Everything I have told you so far was based on anonymous avertissements. How do you say that?’

‘Tip-offs,’ her partner volunteered.

‘Thank you, Emil. Yes. Tip-offs and speculation. We had no actual evidence. We looked. We went deep. But it was not there.

‘And then we discovered that there was to be a festival of literature on the island and we had the idea to create a performance poet who could take part and who would be able to get close to Monsieur le Mesurier, even into his house. We were very pleased when we heard that there would be a party actually inside The Lookout. It was the perfect opportunity.’

‘How did you make sure you were invited?’ I asked.

‘That was not difficult. A cultural foundation in Paris made a financial contribution to the festival on the condition that a French poet was included. It was at the same time that a fake entry in Wikipedia was constructed. We thought it unlikely that anyone would take interest in an obscure poet working in a language that was almost unknown, but in the event that anyone looked, it was there.

‘And so I came to Alderney. I will admit that I was concerned to encounter you at the airport, Mr Hawthorne. It was foolish of me not to have studied the programme more carefully and I was alarmed when you mentioned that you had investigated financial crime. I did not want my enquiry to become entangled. It was important for me to be acting independently of the British police.’

‘You should have told me who you were,’ Hawthorne said.

‘We did discuss exactly that. Emil was in favour of joining together with you and maybe it would have been for the best. I apologise, but it was the decision that I made.’

‘Go on.’

‘I stayed with the other writers and tried to be part of the esprit de corps, although it did not help that your friend had happened to see Emil talking with me when we were at Southampton. I gave the talk. I had learned a number of poems which I hoped nobody would recognise.’

‘You stole a haiku from Akira Anno.’ It was the one thing I’d managed to guess. I wanted them to know.

She didn’t respond. ‘And so we arrived at the party on the Saturday night. I will tell you now my plan as it had been conceived. The most important thing for me was to get access to le Mesurier’s computer. Emil was here to provide me with technical support and he would find it a simple matter to bypass the security and access the database. We knew already that the office was on the first floor. The question only was how to get into the house without being seen and I found the answer to that almost at once.’

‘The Snuggery,’ Hawthorne said.

Marc Bellamy had seen Maïssa in the garden – but that had been several hours before the murder, at half past seven.

‘Exactly. I found this strange little construction at the end of the garden where le Mesurier liked to hide and at the back there was a door which opened onto the path that led up from the beach. I drew back the bolt so that the door remained unlocked and this would allow me to return later in the night. Then I went back to the party and joined in with everybody else. There were just two other things that I did before I left.’

‘You fixed the kitchen door.’

‘Yes. I placed a little ball of paper into the lock to ensure that it could not close properly …’

I remembered now that the newspaper print had been in French. That should have told me something.

‘This was my route back into the house. I also went upstairs. I needed to know the exact location of the office so that Emil and I could easily find it. We would return at three o’clock. Le Mesurier and his wife would be sound asleep. We would take the information that we needed and we would leave.’

‘But that’s not how things worked out,’ Hawthorne said.

‘It was a nightmare,’ Emil muttered in a low voice.

‘It was exactly that. We returned to the beach at three o’clock the next morning and climbed back up to the Snuggery. Of course, the intention was only to pass through, to continue through the garden and into the kitchen, using the door that I had prepared. But instead, when we entered the Snuggery – we locked the door behind us – we were confronted by a scene of the worst horror. Le Mesurier was sitting in a chair. He had been tied down. There was a knife coming out of his throat. It was evident that he had been dead for many hours.’

‘But you didn’t raise the alarm,’ Hawthorne said. There was something in his voice that sounded almost like admiration. ‘You didn’t even hesitate. You weren’t going to let something trivial like a violent murder get in your way.’

The two investigators glanced at each other uncomfortably. ‘Of course we considered every possibility,’ Maïssa admitted. ‘It was not an easy decision to make. But in the end we realised that, no matter what had occurred, we had been given an opportunity and it would be foolish not to exploit it. Le Mesurier had a mobile phone. We could see the outline quite clearly in his trouser pocket.’

‘So you took it out. And you used the fingerprint of his right hand to unlock it.’

She cast her eyes down. ‘You think we are disgusting.’

‘I don’t think of you at all, Ms Lamar. Just tell me this. You needed his print to open the phone. So did you cut the tape that was holding him down?’

‘No. We already noticed that one hand was free. We remarked on it. But we were aware that it was a crime scene. We disturbed nothing.’

‘That’s not quite true. You managed to step in his blood, leaving a footprint. You left another footprint on the beach. Whoever killed le Mesurier was actually a lot more careful than you.’

Maïssa ignored this. ‘We left as quickly as possible. We took the mobile and proceeded across the garden. We entered the house through the kitchen door and went upstairs. We used the passwords contained in the mobile to open the computer in le Mesurier’s office and Emil downloaded all his files, including his emails and accounts, to a memory stick. This took very little time. The house was silent. His wife was asleep. We made no sound.

‘Our work was finished. We left the phone in the office. To return to the Snuggery was not an option to be considered and fortunately we had locked the door behind us. We left the house through the front door and returned to our separate hotels. Unfortunately, it was impossible to leave the island immediately, which is what I wished to do, but now our director of operations has been in contact with the Guernsey police department and we go tonight.’

Her story made complete sense, at least in the context of the facts that we had been able to establish. There had been the footprint on the beach and the second footprint in the dead man’s blood, but the door at the back of the Snuggery had definitely been locked from the inside when we examined it on Sunday morning. Le Mesurier’s body had been saturated in blood, which explained the stain that Hawthorne had found on the back of his phone in the study, and indeed why the phone was there at all. And I had seen Maïssa coming back downstairs when she had made her initial recce, checking where the study was for later.

Even so, it occurred to me that there was a piece missing from the jigsaw. ‘Can I ask something?’ I said. I didn’t want to annoy Hawthorne.

‘Go ahead, mate.’

‘Did either of you drop a coin inside the Snuggery? A two-euro piece?’

When she was pretending to be a poet, Maïssa had treated me with disdain and I hoped it had been part of her performance. But even though she had now been revealed as an undercover investigator, her attitude remained the same. ‘Why would we do that?’ she snapped. ‘Do you think we are idiots?’

I didn’t know how to reply, but for once Hawthorne came to my defence. ‘Actually, I’d say that both of you are fucking idiots, if you want the truth,’ he began. ‘You come over here like Batman and Robin and you get yourselves involved in a murder investigation. But you don’t help anyone because you’ve got bigger fish to fry. In fact, you were obstructive. You say you made no difference to the crime scene, but that’s not true. You took the mobile phone even though it was covered in blood and you left it in the office. You opened and you locked a door. You didn’t even report the crime! You let him sit there all bloody night while the trail went cold. Who knows – but for your meddling, Mrs le Mesurier might be alive right now. You left her to find her husband’s body, but if we could have got there sooner, if we could have questioned her before she’d had time to think, she might have told us what she knew.

‘So you two can piss off back to OLAF and I hope you find what you’re looking for on your memory stick, although it looks to me as if the whole thing is going to be a complete waste of time anyway because the line is dead – as are Helen and Charles le Mesurier – and you’ve got nothing left to investigate except for some French company that will probably walk rings around you. What time is your flight?’

‘The plane is waiting now.’

‘Well, I won’t say bon voyage. Just, get lost.’

Maïssa Lamar and her assistant made no reply. They picked themselves up and Emil collected the suitcases. They were heading for the door when Maïssa stopped and turned round. ‘There is one thing,’ she said. ‘When I came to the party at The Lookout, I carried with me a purse which I left in the hall. I thought it would be safe. But when I left the house, I discovered that it had been opened. A fifty-euro note had been taken and some of the coins had spilled out.’

‘Do you have any idea who took it?’

‘No. Perhaps the girl who was serving … I don’t know. But it is possible also that a coin may have gone.’

‘Thank you.’ Hawthorne watched them leave and I think we were both in full accord. We were glad to see them gone.